i wonder if my pets have like a proper language and when i try to speak back to them im just speaking jargon
like for example my cat always speaks to me when I come home and i meow back to her and she’ll meow again & even though i don’t think twice about it to her it’s probably a situation where it’s like
her, meowing: “im glad you’re home”
me, meowing back: “tax benefits”
her, meowing: “why do u always do this”
me
cats actually have a human-specific language. cats don’t often meow at each other and seem to use subvocal communications that humans can’t hear to chat cat-to-cat. however, cats seem to use what humans would call “shout-until-you’re-understood” to speak to humans. so basically, it’s more like:
“I’M GLAD YOU’RE HOME!”
“tax benefits”
“NO, I’M GLAD YOU ARE HOME”
“waffle iron”
“IT’S OKAY. I LOVE YOU TOO, MY DUMB HUMAN”
It’s fucking amazing the way cats have adapted to life with humans okay
like they domesticated THEMSELVES because us storing grain created a habitat for rats and they were like ‘why hunt in the wild when I can hunt in one place?” and then it turned out we had these fireplaces with nice warm hearths AND that we were willing to put rugs on floors and cushions on chairs and surrender our body heat if we were properly mollified and cats were like ‘hell fucking yeah’ and just moved the fuck in.
But the above poster is right, cats don’t meow at each other very much. Feral cats rarely vocalize in our hearing range at all, and when they do it’s because they’re about to do violence. Not only did cats adopt us, and not the other way around, they developed a method of communicating especially FOR living with us. They observed that humans make mouth sounds in a specific range and started making their own mouth sounds in that same range in the hopes of communicating their needs to us and if you don’t think that’s the most awesome shit get out.
But it gets cooler. Obviously cats have variable intelligence – I have met very bright cats and I have met truly stupid ones. But the species as a whole has the ability to make somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 distinct vocalizations that humans can perceive. Which means cats can CHOOSE A MOUTH SOUND that means ONE THING and have it consistently mean that one thing. And humans who bother to pay attention can actually learn what the cat is saying and respond to it properly.
Mine is one of the bright cats who does that. So far, her vocabulary of distinct and identifiable sounds include:
I want food
I want WET food
I want water
clean my litter box
there’s something outside and you should look at it immediately
there is an insect somewhere and I intend to murder it
Play with me
Can I come sit with you/are you willing to pet me
Hello Mama (she has a special sound for me)
Hello other human
Stop making that noise or I will literally bite your face (she hates people whistling)
Who are you/What are you doing? (this one can be used with varying levels of suspicion and/or hostility, I’ve noticed)
Bird! (or other out-of-reach prey object… this is paired with that teeth-chattering thing they do)
And the most amusing one: Mama, it’s time for bed. She developed this one within the last few years when she started sleeping on my pillow. Obviously that’s no fun unless my head is also on the pillow, so when she wants to go to bed, she comes and tells me it’s time for ME to go to bed so she can sleep on my face.
And the thing is, I don’t actually think I listed all of them. We joke constantly about how Sephie bosses my husband around because she can make herself understood very well but the truth is, her vocabulary makes her about as easy to understand as your average toddler who can say ‘milk’ when she wants milk. Cats are cool as shit and brilliant when they want to be and I will never get over it.
Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa?
Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now?
On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…
And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.
We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.
As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.
I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.
… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.
Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.
This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.
No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.
Also its apparently infertility awareness week so remember that without free, on demand access to fertility treatment trans people need to choose between transition and fertility. In a world where adoption is harder for anyone with unconventional family setups, or for economically disadvantaged people like a lot of us are, that’s really limiting to the sort of families we’ll ever get to have.
That makes it sound so passive and benign and not like what it actually is: a choice between staying in the closet and being sterilized.
Even when sterilization is not legally mandated we should realize that lack of access to necessary medical treatment to preserve fertility is deliberately designed to punish and control.
And if you don’t recognize the lack of access to fertility treatments for trans people as oppressive, consider the fact that most health insurance plans cover the drug viagra (more than cover birth control), and most of the people taking it are old cis white men, meaning there is already precedent for healthcare insurers providing easy access to fertility-preserving treatments – but only for a specific (read: privileged) subsection of the population.
The Democrats won back the House, gained subpoena power, and can now serve as an actual check on 45. This is very very good.
So even if it wasn’t the “blue wave” a lot of people were hoping for, I want you to remember that the GOP no longer will hold as much power as they did. Lots of women were voted into office, LGBT+ candidates were voted into office, more POC were voted into office, two more Muslim women were voted into office, Florida voted to restore voting rights to over one million felons who have completed their terms of sentence, and Massachusetts voted to protect transgender rights. I know there was more but this is what stood out to me.
And right after I finished writing that I learned the GOP supermajority in NC is over and our Governor’s veto powers can now be sustained. And the Dems now hold a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court which means something might actually get done about our horrific gerrymandering and I totally just started crying. I think my anxiety just dropped about sixty pegs.
Despite the gerrymandering and very blatant voter suppression (i see you, Kemp), we did take steps in the right direction today. So take some deep breaths, take the next few days to yourself and get re-centered, and then keep going. Lean on your friends, treat yourself to something nice, come back with a vengeance. We’re in for a long fight.
for a quick change of pace–i know we’ve all seen a thousand posts about voting, but what i haven’t seen (not yet) is one saying thank you.
thank you for those who made it out in the rain and the cold, who organized and canvassed and took on the onerous task of working with non-voting & conservative friends/family to change their stance if at least just this once. thank you for those who stood in line for hours, who had to travel because your voting place was moved, who had to jump through ridiculous fucking hoops to register, who weren’t inspired but showed up anyway for the disenfranchised and the greater good. thank you as well to everyone who voted early, absentee, and provisional.
Thoughtfulfangirling 